Shareware Extravaganza

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OPTIKS The Spread Sheet for Graphics Preface At long last, OPTIKS is going to be documented. I have been working on OPTIKS and its forbearers for the last year and hundreds of people have actually been using OPTIKS without any help at all. This is probably a tribute to the fact that OPTIKS has been developed with Lotus 1-2-3 as a model. Functionally the two programs are totally different, but 1-2-3 has proved to be the standard in "user friendly" software. Lotus 1-2-3 is actually "user seductive". When I had to choose a face for OPTIKS I decided to make it similar in many ways to 1-2-3's friendly smile. If you use 1-2-3, you already know much about using OPTIKS. What 1-2-3 is to the cell, OPTIKS is to the pixel. What's a pixel? Pixel is the name of the kitten in Robert Heinlein's book "The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls", but it means a point of light on the screen - a picture element. OPTIKS deals with points. You can organize these points into pictures and you can grab a bunch of points in the shape of a rectangle and call it a "RANGE". The thing you might want to remember in OPTIKS is that it knows nothing about letters or characters, lines or shapes. It knows dots on the screen and at best can be told about a bunch of dots. OPTIKS is a 1-2-3 like menu which leads to little routines to do things with pixels. The main thing that OPTIKS is used for is to RETRIEVE files from a disk so that we can view them. The files are almost always pictures of some sort created by OPTIKS or by specialized "paint" or "draw" programs. There are other routines which allow you to move pieces of the picture around, type in various fonts and do various things to change and (hopefully) improve the picture. OPTIKS will even allow you to MERGE another picture (perhaps from another type of paint program) into an existing picture. After you have viewed a picture and used some of the OPTIKS features to alter the picture you can SAVE the picture in one two dozen or more different file formats supported by OPTIKS for both read and write. This makes OPTIKS ideal as a file conversion utility. The version which writes out files in a variety of formats is available to paid users only, but the price is less than that of the competition. Although competing file conversion utilities are all very good, OPTIKS has a few extra features that make it easy to use and is usually very fast on file loads and saves compared to most programs. An important point to make about OPTIKS is that it is an evolutionary product. It started on PC bulletin Boards as a small view utility called FMAC and then grew into a prototype program called PCRGB. It has been around for a while now as OPTIKS, but it has doubled in features so that now it has over 300 menu items. And it is still not done! How can I sell a product that's not finished? My answer is that OPTIKS may never be finished. The menu items that tell you apologetically that this or that feature is not installed are really goals for the immediate future. I am constantly adding to and refining the program. There is always a new file type I'd like to support or a new way of changing a picture I'd like to add. I look at paint and publishing programs every day and very often I see something that should be added to OPTIKS. Sometimes I see a feature that the competition has installed, but it could be improved. OPTIKS is not really competing with programs like PC Paintbrush or Ventura Publishing. I can't do the good job that the coders who worked hard on these programs have done. OPTIKS occupies a niche somewhere in between these giants and off to the side. OPTIKS can read files that other programs can't, and create files that are perfect for inclusion in paint and publishing programs. OPTIKS is a graphics utility for creating output to be used by specialty programs. Its a "Jack of all trades" program that is like having a Swiss Army Knife in your pocket. It saves you hours of time when you need it. But I would never use OPTIKS as a replacement for a Paint program or expect it to do the very specific functions of a Publish program. One last thing. I am Keith Graham. I am writing OPTIKS, I am writing this. I (or my wife) answers the phone when you call (914) 623-4161. There is no one else involved in the project. This is good and this is bad. I can't make a living off of OPTIKS so 10 hours a day I am out in the jungle busting my butt for other people. This makes me hard to reach. You can reach information of PC Rockland and make voice orders at (914) 359-3560. This number is only for orders of ordering information, and no one there has tech support information. The advantage of this number is that a real person answers during normal east coast working hours and phone messages will be returned (for order information only). OPTIKS USER MANUAL CHAPTER 1 HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS OPTIKS runs on IBM PC's and PC compatibles with graphics screens and more than 256K free memory. If you want to print with OPTIKS you will need a graphics printer. SOFTWARE: OPTIKS works on all versions of PC-DOS and MS-DOS from 2.00 on up. OPTIKS will grab as much free memory as it can, and needs at least 256k free to be useful. It will sometimes conflict with memory resident programs or time slicing programs which can't handle graphics or do not use memory well. OPTIKS is what you would call a "Well Behaved" program in that it does everything it can according to the rules. It should peacefully coexist with most applications. If you find an application which causes OPTIKS to crash or some other program to crash, I would like to know about it. I will try to fix the problem. DOS 3.x uses an internal stack for interrupts. Pressing the CTRL-BREAK repeatedly to bring back the OPTIKS menu will eventually blow the DOS stack. This is DOS problem and refer to the DOS manual for a fix. OPTIKS needs no special CONFIG.SYS options such as BUFFERS or FILES statements. OPTIKS opens one file at a time and then closes it. There is never more than one file open at a time. OPTIKS is designed as a single user program and may get into conflicts when placed on a network. If there is a need to run OPTIKS on a network and conflicts occur I will add DOS file locking commands to the file open and closes. This seems unlikely to be a problem so I will wait until I hear of a need for this. HARDWARE: GRAPHICS BOARDS: OPTIKS makes an attempt to identify the graphics board plugged into your system. It can identify EGA, AT&T 6300 and CGA boards. If you have a monochrome system, OPTIKS will check first to see if you have an EGA and if that fails will send you into Hercules graphics mode. If you have neither an EGA, AT&T 6300 or a monochrome system the program enters into 640*200 mode CGA graphics. In addition to these modes OPTIKS can be made to select VGA modes, Paradise 480, Tseng Labs or Nec graphics modes, Compaq graphics and AMDEK/WYSE 1280 modes. The 1280 boards work well in 640 mode, but not all of OPTIKS features will work at 1280 mode. 1280 mode should be used for viewing graphics only. MEMORY: OPTIKS needs about 200k for the program itself and its work areas and then grabs pages of memory in 32k chunks until it runs out of memory. These pages are used for storing the picture data. If you do not have EMS memory, OPTIKS can grab, at most, around 384K. This is not enough for many large scanned images, but it is perfectly adequate for Apple MacPaint pictures which are narrow and not very long. If you have EMS memory you can assign some or all of it to be used by OPTIKS. The assignment is not automatic. You must use the menu system of OPTIKS to allocate some memory to OPTIKS for use as picture work space. If you use the KEEP option to save you configuration, the next time you start OPTIKS, it will automatically use the specified amount of EMS memory. Since OPTIKS uses only a few simple features of EMS memory it should not matter which EMS card or version of the EMS driver that you use. The most EMS memory that can be used with OPTIKS is 4 megs. This should be enough for the most humungous image. MOUSES: Yes, it says mouses not mice. Mice are small rodents, mouses are small hand held pointing devices. OPTIKS will identify and use a Microsoft mouse driver. I have a Logitech mouse and I use it with OPTIKS. I have used a Genius mouse with OPTIKS. This leads me to the assumption that OPTIKS will work with a Microsoft mouse. There are no settings for the mouse. The keyboard will always work. I have a Mouse Systems mouse driver that I have used with a Mouse Systems mouse clone, but it is crude and difficult to control. I would suggest using a Microsoft Driver with the Mouse Systems Mouse and letting OPTIKS handle the details. Microsoft recently changed the mouse driver so that a reset resets the entire hardware involved. I use a reset to clear the mouse in order to stop at a line or position better, but this causes delays on computers using a new mouse driver. I have tried their suggested fix and it does nothing except make the mouse unstable for older versions of the driver. PRINTERS: OPTIKS works with Laser printers and Dot matrix printers. I have seen the output of IBM graphics printers, IBM Proprinters, Epson FX series printers, Toshiba 3x1 printers, Canon Laserbeam printers, Hewlett Packard Laserjet Printers and Ricoh Laser Printers. I have tested OPTIKS on Panasonic printers. Other printers are being tested. OPTIKS will write Encapsulated PostScript Files which can be printed on PostScript Compatible printers. JLASER board printing works. I have added LaserMaster CAPcard support which I have not seen work, but there should be no problem. OPTIKS supports only single pass graphics so if you have an EPSON printer which software utilizes the double pass graphics, the output may look a little light. This is under investigation. I will be purchasing an Epson compatible printer in order to better test the graphics. SCANNERS: OPTIKS works on CANON IX-12 scanners and Princeton Graphics Scanners. JLASER is a constant challenge, but you should be able to use it in current versions. I am told that DEST scanners work by specifying CANON. ENHANCEMENTS: As technology advances, OPTIKS will be adding new hardware support. As soon as I receive the specifications on new iron I will add routines to OPTIKS to support it. I often work in the dark in that I can't test my work. This is frustrating to me and to my users who must wait through several revisions in order to get some features working correctly. Sometimes suppliers support me directly with hardware loans. This is appreciated and I always try to thank suppliers who help out by trying to present their hardware in a good light. The features developed with the help of suppliers are always the best parts of OPTIKS because I can do my best work when I have good support. OPTIKS USER MANUAL CHAPTER 2 GETTING STARTED QUICK If you can read this you have gotten OPTIKS out of its ARC and onto a disk. I will not tell you how to put OPTIKS on a disk or warn you to make backup copies, because you are already on your way to being a "power user" or you wouldn't be interested in OPTIKS. You need OK.EXE or OKPRIV.EXE to use OPTIKS. OK.EXE is the free version which is distributed for evaluation purposes. It is identical to OKPRIV.EXE except that OKPRIV.EXE allows you to write out graphics images in a wider variety of formats. OKPRIV.EXE also has an internal serial number which can be used to verify ownership. When I talk about OPTIKS I will refer OKPRIV.EXE or OK.EXE as OK. This saves time. OK needs to be on the current path to work (you knew that). It does not have to be on the current disk or sub-directory as long as it is on the path. You type OK (or OKPRIV) to get OPTIKS started. It will take a fraction of a second to load in and grab memory and clear it out. Its housekeeping chores include looking on the current disk and sub-directory for a file called CONFIG.OK This file contains information on how you have set your defaults. You don't need it, but you may want to create one later on. The first time OPTIKS starts up it uses its defaults which 99% of the time are what you need. OPTIKS bloops at you when its done housekeeping (usually under 2 seconds). It displays the OPTIKS logo and throws you into menu mode. DEFINITION: MENU MODE. That's the mode where you can see a menu and make selections from the menu. The menu is the row of words in capital letters going across the top of the screen. The choices are: FILE ENVIRN PRINT IMAGE DRAW TYPE SCAN QUIT The word FILE is in reverse video. Underneath the menu line is an explanation of what the word in reverse video can do for you. If you move the reverse video cursor using the left and right arrow keys you can see a short explanation of each of the menu items and what it does for you. Right now we are interested in looking at a graphics image file in the disk. I always use an Apple MacPaint file called REFLECT.MAC to test so I include it with the OPTIKS disk. We want to get this file into OPTIKS. You can find the word FILE on the menu. I try my best to get the menu word to correspond to the function of the menu selection. It should be obvious most of the time what each menu does. You will become an expert user before you know it. Getting through the first time is all it takes. Move the reverse video cursor to the word file and press the return key. OPTIKS gives you another menu. (You could have just pressed the F key and OPTIKS would have found the menu item that starts with an F.) The new menu looks like: RETRIEV SAVE MERGE LIST DEFAULT CHECK We are interested in retrieving a file so we can choose the retrieve function. If we had a picture that we wanted to save we could enter S to save it or we could merge a new picture with the existing picture using merge. List is used to list out all or some of the files on a disk and default can move us to a new disk drive or sub-directory. Check is used when we can't figure out what kind of a graphic image we have. Check will look at the file and see if it can recognize it. (Handy when you have 30 or more different types of graphic files cluttering your disks). By the way, if you accidentally get into the wrong menu branch you can always back out the way you got in by hitting the Esc key. Don't panic! - Escape. Press R (or move the cursor to RETRIEV and press return). Your are given another %#!@ menu which looks like: PCR TEXT LANG BLOAD FONTS MORE-> PCR files are ultra-squished image files. PCR is a format unique to OPTIKS and you may want to use this file format if disk space is at a premium. But we are trying to look at an Apple MacPaint file. Text is an ascii text file, LANG is for Lotus PIC and Postscript. Bload is for Basic BLOAD/BSAVE files and FONTS is for typing and such. None of these have anything to do with Apple MacPaint. By process of elimination you are going to have to choose the MORE option. Press M or move the cursor to MORE and press return. Oh no! another menu: APPLE PCB IMG WIPS RLE CUT FONTASY MORE-> Finally there is Apple and all you have to do is press the return because the cursor is right on the APPLE menu option. Pressing A will also work. The disk drive light comes on as OPTIKS takes a look to see what you've got on the disk and then shows you a directory of the disk. OPTIKS knows that Apple MacPaint files have an extension of .MAC and shows you only those files that match this extension. If you have none, OPTIKS will show you exactly that - nothing. OPTIKS has looked at the disk and made a list of the files that it found. You may press the up arrow or the down arrow to display all of the file names. If reflect.MAC were the only MAC file on the diskette then that would be displayed. You can use the up and down arrows looking for a file, or you can change default disks and directories by pressing the page down key. You can get a new file list by pressing the page up key. Your last resort is to type the complete name of the file that you want to load. If you typed everything correctly and OPTIKS finds REFLECT.MAC on the disk, a neat little hourglass will appear and the sand will drain while the file is loaded. When OPTIKS is finished (it only takes a few seconds) it will beep and you will be looking at the etching by M.C. Escher of Escher himself holding a silver reflecting sphere. Actually Reflect is a big picture and you will only be looking at the top part of it. The menu will be gone (thank goodness) and you will be in VIEW MODE. DEFINITION: VIEW MODE. The mode that you use to view a picture. When in View mode you can use the cursor control keys to move around the picture. Home brings you to the upper left hand corner of the work area and END brings you to the lower right hand corner. END does not bring you to the lower right hand corner of the picture image which is quite a bit smaller than the whole work space. PgUp and PgDn go up and down the picture in chunks. The up and down arrows move you through the picture slower. The left and right arrows move you horizontally through the picture. The picture may be too big to view all at once, but you can browse through it using the cursor control keys. You can only look at the picture for so long before you decide its time to do something like print it out. You will have to get into Menu mode to print the picture (remember PRINT was on the first menu). You can get back to the menu by pressing the / key (same as Lotus 1-2-3) or you can press Esc. Press / now and the menu will appear. This time we are interested in printing so press P or move the cursor over to the PRINT option and press return. The menu that comes up is: PRINT FILE CAPcard You now have the option to print to a printer or to a file. You may have some need in the future to print to a file, but for now press the P to print to the printer. The menu is now: RANGE PAGE LINEF GO CONFIG PAGE is to eject the current page from the printer. LINEF is to give the printer a line feed. RANGE is to tell OPTIKS how much of the printer you would like to print. You must specify a range before you can print! Press R or move the cursor to RANGE and press return to set the range. The menu disappears and you are given instructions to move a pointer to the upper left hand corner of the range. One problem is that the message has covered part of the picture. You can enter Alt-C to clear off any clutter on the screen. Let's just print Escher's head for now. Press the down arrow and you will notice that the pointer is a finger. You are in a new mode now called RANGE mode. DEFINITION: RANGE MODE: The mode you are in whenever a finger is on the screen. Range mode is used for 1) pointing and 2) defining a range. Move the finger to a point just above and to the left of Escher's head. As you move the finger down, the picture will move up so you won't fall off of the bottom of the screen. When you get the finger positioned you can start the range by hitting the return key. When you hit the return another message will appear telling you to move to the lower right hand corner of the range. Move the finger down and to the right until Escher's head is in reverse video. The part of the picture that shows in reverse video is the range. Press the return key when you have got the range you want to print in reverse video. That's all there is to range. You should be back into the menu. Now, assuming that you have an Epson or IBM compatible graphics printer you can press G or move over to the GO option and press return. This will start you printing. (If you don't have a printer, I would skip this part.) If you don't have an IBM graphics type printer you will have to use CONFIG and then MODEL and then DOT or LASER and then select the correct printer from the menu. You would then use Esc to get back up to the printing menu to press G. OPTIKS prints pretty fast compared to some graphics programs, but graphics printing is slow at best (its all those darn little dots). When you are through printing you may want to press P for page to eject the page from the printer. You can press Esc to get back up to the Main menu. And from there you can explore the rest of the menu items. The last time I counted I came up with 300 different menu items and I've added more since then. Many are hardware specific or are used for changing the defaults. Most lead to menus within menus. LEAVING OPTIKS: OPTIKS is a great program, but sometime even I want to get back to the DOS prompt. You have to get to the main menu. If you are in view mode press the Esc key or / and the main menu will appear. If you are in a menu press Esc until you get to the main menu. (Hint: you are looking for QUIT). From the main menu press Q. You will be asked to confirm and you press Y if you are sure. OPTIKS will then clean up the mess it made of memory and return to DOS. If you are in a floppy disk based system you may be asked to put the boot disk with COMMAND.COM back into the A: drive before DOS will let you continue. Whew, you did it. Next time will be a breeze. From now on you can either hunt through the menus or dip into the rest of the documentation for information about how to read, write and alter images. You have already done all of the hard stuff. Everything else is either more of the same or obvious. The best way to learn about OPTIKS and its capabilities is to explore the menus. Start with REFLECT.MAC and try all the neat stuff under IMAGE which allows you do shrink and stretch and tilt and rotate plus other nifty things. Try saving the image in different formats. Saving a file is similar to printing, when you choose SAVE and then a type of file you will be asked for a range. Also try pressing the F1 key and you will be given lots of information in a very small space. OPTIKS DEFAULTS OPTIKS in a attempt to be as helpful as possible tries to anticipate your needs. OPTIKS starts up and looks around your hardware for 1) a mouse, 2) an EMS driver, 3) a recognizable video board and 4) a CONFIG.OK file. The CONFIG.OK file is a record of your stored configuration. It is written to the current subdirectory whenever you go to /ECK. (That is / Environment Config Keep.) This "keeps" your current variation from the default on disk. In this way you won't have to change display modes, EMS, screen width, favorite printer, etc. every time you start up. There is no default for mouse. Either a mouse driver is there or it is not. On early versions of DOS, there may be a problem with DOS not cleaning up the interrupts and OPTIKS can be fooled into thinking there is a Mouse when there is not. OPTIKS works best in DOS 3.x. If your version of 2.1 or 2.11 is working, there is no reason to change, but if OPTIKS hangs the machine when you start up, consider trying a newer version of DOS. (I have used no DOS 3.x specific features so if you get to the menu without hanging by all means use the leaner, meaner DOS 2.) Below are listed some of the more important defaults which are saved in the CONFIG.OK file. If you don't use any of them, then don't worry about defaults and try another chapter. VIRT - Virtual Screen Width Virtual in computerese means: It looks and acts like its there, but it really isn't. Your REAL screen width is either 640 pels or 720 pels depending on your monitor. A Hercules screen is 720, most of the others are 640. OPTIKS figures this out when it starts up, and you can't tell it different. It is possible to have a virtual screen much bigger than the real screen. You can use the cursor controls to move around inside the virtual page so that a piece at a time shows up on your real screen. The default virtual screen is 1024 pels wide, but you can double that (and double it again and a again) up to 8192 pels wide. If you think of the way a Laser Printer prints at 300 dots per inch, 8,192 pels is 27+ inches wide. That's a big picture. (divide the # of pels by the print density to get inches). There is price for fooling with the virtual page width. You only have so much memory. You can display the current memory situation from the Environment menu, and by adding total EMS memory allocated and real memory used for pictures you can get the total picture memory. That is all the memory you get. The wider the virtual page width the fewer lines of picture can be allocated. Number of lines times the width of a virtual page equals total picture memory. Picture memory is a constant so if you want a longer picture you need a narrower page. If you have no EMS memory and not much free DOS memory you will cut off the bottoms of most pictures. If you make the virtual page width very wide, you may not be able to see more than a screen of any image. 1024 pels is best for Readmacs which are fixed at 576 pels wide. 2048 is best for the large .PCC files on the OPTIKS conference. 4096 pels will give you more than 13 inches width at 300 DPI. Only power mad DTP users will consider the 8,196 pel virtual page width. Once you select a virtual page width you like, "KEEP" it by going into Config and using the Keep option. This will place a CONFIG.OK on the current directory. The next time OPTIKS starts up it will look at the CONFIG.OK to see what size virtual page you prefer and set it correctly. COMING SOON - MORE GREAT DOCUMENTATION! I will be issuing documentation at the rate of a couple of chapters a month for the next few months until its time to go back and rewrite the whole thing. The documentation, like OPTIKS itself, will evolve as I find need to explain things. I will follow the format of the menus going from left to right. Chapter 3 will probably be a discussion of the modes in OPTIKS plus a more detailed description of the features of the program itself. I will discuss the General Help screens. Chapter 4 will start with FILE information and should give you some hints on how to load and save files. In the mean time I hope this is helpful to someone.